Erich Gamma, distinguished engineer at IBM Rational, yesterday presented a very different vision of the future of development teamwork at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. His vision is not of a lone coder in a darkened basement, but more of a musician up on a brightly lit stage playing in an orchestra where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It is the vision behind the development of Jazz, a joint technology project between IBM Research and IBM Rational to build a scalable, extensible, Eclipse-based team collaboration platform for integrating work across the software and systems development lifecycle.

The Jazz platform was inspired by Gamma's work leading the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools (JDT), he explained in an interview following his keynote at the symposium.